“Engadget & Gizmodo are just two immature little kids attempting to reap the benefits of a journalistic profession neither truly understands.”
I couldn’t agree more. And yet I still subscribe to their RSS feeds…
Tag: tech
So the big news in the tech world yesterday was what Steve Jobs talked about during his keynote address at Macworld Expo in San Francisco. The annual technology conference geared toward the Mac OS, and all things Apple, Inc., is often used for the announcement of new products from my favorite fruit company. Yesterday was no exception. Here are some of my thoughts on what was announced:
Time Capsule
If I hadn’t bought an Airport Extreme Base Station last year, to replace a router that died, I’d be buying a new 1 TB–yes, that’s a T, for terabyte–Time Capsule right now. Merging an Airport Extreme Base Station with a “server-grade” hard drive, the Time Capsule allows for wireless backups from all of your Leopard-based Macs via Time Machine. Jobs called it a “back-up applicance”.
Backing up your data is very important, and too few people do it, realizing the value of doing so only when it’s too late. Time Capsule is a dead-simple way, for most people, to ensure their Macs are getting backed up. Plug in and power on the Time Capsule, open up Time Machine on your Mac and point it to the Capsule, and you’re done.
Time Capsule comes in two sizes, the 500 GB version for $299, and the aforementioned 1 TB version for $499. That’s an amazing bargain, a terabyte of storage and a full wired/wireless router for five hundred smackers. As I said, if we didn’t already have the AEBS router, my credit card would have already seen one of these charged to it.
iPhone Update
Today was the 200th day the iPhone had been available for purchase, and Apple’s sold 4 million of them, an average of 20,000 iPhones sold per day. This means that in terms of United States smartphone market share, Apple has nearly 20% of the national smartphone market.
The rumors of a 1.1.3 update to the iPhone proved to be true. The home screen can now be customized, and the Maps application–the underrated killer feature of the iPhone in my humble opinion–is now even more super-powered. The new Location feature in Maps is great. Combining data from Google and Skyhook Wireless, your iPhone can now, without GPS on board, triangulate your position within a couple of blocks. It pulled up my location at home with no problem.
You can, finally, send a SMS message to more than one person, something my lowly Motorola v557 was capable of two years ago. The WebClips functionality is pretty neat; you can create a WebClip from any web page or portion of a web page and pop it on to your home screen, so it’s easy to just go to Google, or The New York Times, or whatever web page you wish, with one touch.
I’ve had quite some fun this afternoon playing with all of this new stuff, and it’s almost like getting a new iPhone for free. All in all, it makes the iPhone an even better communication device.
iTunes Movie Rentals
In addition to buying movies through the iTunes Store, you can now rent them as well. Library movies (viz: older titles) are $2.99, and new releases are $3.99. From the time you click “Rent Movie” in the iTunes Store and it downloads, you have 30 days to watch the movie. From the time you click “Play” on the movie, you have 24 hours to watch it. You can also transfer the movie to another device, such as your iPod or iPhone, and watch it there as well, before your 24 hours or 30 days, depending on where you are when you perform the transfer, are up.
The thirty days requirement is pretty decent, but I find the 24 hours one to be a little restrictive. It should be at least 48 hours, and 72 would be better, with 96 being the ideal.
Going hand-in-hand with the new rental service is an updated Apple TV, or as Jobs put it, “Apple TV Take 2”. Whereas the original Apple TV pretty much required you to have a computer to sync it up with, the new version acts as a stand-alone box. You can rent movies from the iTunes Store in HD through the Apple TV, for only $1 more than the standard resolutions. So library titles go to $3.99 and new releases are $4.99, and no trip to the mailbox or corner Blockbuster is required.
I’m still not convinced that we have a real use for this in our house, given our movie viewing habits. For now, Netflix will continue to suffice, but I’ll be keeping my eyes on the Apple TV, and I’m sure I’ll try out the new rentals even without the new box.
MacBook Air
This had all the buzz, and was the announcement I was most looking forward to. I was ready to pounce on ordering Apple’s new subnotebook, provided it met my personal expectations.
Apple has created the world’s thinnest notebook computer. At its thickest point, the MacBook Air is 0.76 of an inch, and it weighs only three pounds. It comes with a full-size keyboard, a 13.3-inch LED backlit display, and a 1.6 or 1.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor. Two gigabytes of RAM, an 80 GB hard drive, 802.11n wireless networking, Bluetooth, and a built-in iSight camera. A pricey option is to ditch the standard hard drive for a 64 GB solid state drive (viz: no moving parts), and when I say pricey, I do mean pricey: $999 on top of the base $1,799 cost.
You won’t find much in the way of ports on it, either: MagSafe power port, a single USB port, headphone jack, and a micro-DVI port which requires adapters to hook up to external displays. That’s it. The trackpad is larger than on previous MacBook versions, and features multitouch, so you can perform some of those pinch, zoom, and rotate gestures you may have seen with the iPhone.
The downsides to this incredible piece of tech? For me, the hard drive size is the first. I put a 160 GB drive in my four year-old 12-inch PowerBook last year, and have gotten quite used to the extra room it gave me. I’d hate to step back down by half. Only two gigabytes of RAM? And no way to upgrade it? My two year-old iMac is maxed out at 2 GB, and some times I bump against that particular ceiling. I’d really prefer a machine that can handle up to four. The battery is also not replaceable by the user. This might be okay on an iPod or iPhone, but in a full-size computing system devoted to the ultimate road warriors?
Ultimately, I decided this was not the next notebook computer for me. It’s a really awesome system, and if someone were to buy one for me, I wouldn’t hesitate to take it, but that’s not happening. I think I’ll be better served ultimately by a MacBook Pro, and with seven and a half months since the latest edition of those came out, they’re due for a refresh, even a “silent” one like we saw with the Mac Pros last week.
Summation
In the end, it was what I would call a typical Steve Jobs Macworld Expo keynote address. There were the requisite ooohs and aaaahs, Apple’s making some evolutionary gains in all facets of its business, and there was a great new product introduced that has the entire tech world talking. It wasn’t a blow-me-away sort of keynote, as was last year’s with the announcement of the iPhone, but then they can’t all be like that. Still better than anything Bill does on stage.
Ladies and gentlemen, do you ever find yourself worrying over what to buy the geek in your life for their birthday, or your anniversary, or Christmas? Wonder no more. Just pick up the waffle iron that makes keyboard waffles.
Oh, yes, you read that right. Keyboard waffles.
[Via Lee via IM.]
Red Sox ace Curt Schilling is blogging.
(And for all the geeks, he’s using WordPress.)
TechCrunch is reporting that Yahoo! has announced unlimited storage for all email accounts, beginning May 2007. Gosh, just in time to be ready for all those new iPhone users…
[Via Michael Arrington on Twitter.]
It’s been difficult trying to explain Twitter to some of my friends and family. (My wife just doesn’t get it.)
Thanks to Twitter’s “unpaid evangelist”, Robert Scoble, I came across Rafe Needleman’s great intro to the Twitterverse. Read, join, add me as a friend.
From the 02.26.07 edition of Red Herring magazine:
California’s proposed incandescent bulb ban (see “Could California Ban the Bulb?” RedHerring.com, February 1, 2007) is ridiculous! Fluorescent bulbs may last longer (not in my house) but you have to include the cost of the ballast and the starter in both energy to produce and additional expense of the fixture. When these and the additional cost of installation are included in the equation, plus fixture replacement costs due to poor reliability, the cost of fluorescent lighting is vastly more expensive than incandescent lighting. Incandescent lighting is also better for the health of our eyes and sanity as that endless flicker fatigues the eyes and drives people nuts!
Fluorescent bulbs are also considered hazardous waste. The energy costs to clean up or keep the environment clean are not worth the few bucks saved at the meter. This ban is not a good idea. Neither is Title 24, which bans incandescent sockets in new-home construction. People just change out the fluorescent fixtures to incandescent after the house has been inspected. Then the fixtures just end up in the dump. I for one will just buy my bulbs out of state and stock up.
The best way to reduce energy waste is to educate people and business to not waste it. Turn the lights off when not in use!
–Roger Smith, Bishop, California
With the mass, recent push for everyone to switch to fluorescent bulbs, I thought a contrarian point of view might be good for discussion.
Well, the Rex Grossman Chicago fans have grown to fear and Colts fans have grown to love was the Rex Grossman that showed up for the Super Bowl™. And the Colts’ defense Colts fans hoped would show up did. Take away that the opening kickoff run back, and you have a blowout, ladies and gentlemen.
Had some fun geeking out on the technology used to show the American Professional Football National Championship™. (See NFL? Two can play the trademark game. Disclaimer: I graciously allow the use of this trademark by any and all persons in the United States and abroad except the National Football League™.)
Our church, like many others, decided to have a Party Which Shall Not Be Named™ to view the American Professional Football National Championship™ game. The kicker was this: said game would start whilst many members, notably the myriad teenagers who would be the prime audience for viewing of said game, were still in attendance of the 5 PM worship service. So, technology to the rescue.
Enter a church member’s TiVo, slaved to his Slingbox. This same fellow’s ThinkPad, with the appropriate Slingbox interface software, resides in the Dungeon, where the above-referenced game was going to be shown. The ThinkPad is hooked up to the Dungeon’s projector unit, resized to a viewing area of 55 inches to comply with NFL regulations. Voila! Kickoff for us was at 6:15 PM CST, and we didn’t have to endure Prince at halftime. (Much to the displeasure of some of the yoots in attendance; it was about a 50-50 split in the vote.)
It was a lot of fun listening to the cheers and jeers of the crowd for the commercials. For instance, the commercial featuring K-Fraud, er, Kevin Federline, was roundly jeered, until the end, when K-Fraud, er, Mr. Federline, is shown working as a fast food fry guy. The jeers quickly turned to cheers. Such is the opinion of most yoots, it would seem, of the former Mr. Britney Spears. (And sorry, Toyota, I can maybe buy that your new Tundra can haul that big load up that steep of a grade from a dead stop, but there’s no freaking way I’m buying it not sliding down the other side when the brakes are applied, anti-lock or not. Your commercial met with wide disapproval from our polled viewers.) Budweiser didn’t get any props from our yoots; apparently they don’t care how “old school” Jay-Z is, August Busch IV, you don’t show up Don Shula.
As a copyright holder myself, I wholeheartedly agree with Brent: the NFL was perfectly within their right to enforce their trademark against the church in Indiana. They just look like royal jerks for doing so.
The 55-inch restriction is a joke; if I had 300 of my closest friends over to my home where they, at no charge whatsoever, could consume beverages and food I purchased and cooked while they watched the Super Bowl™ on my 60-inch plasma (yeah, I wish), what’s the difference between that and the viewing at Fall Creek Baptist Church? (Trademark infringement and the church’s proposition to raise money for a mission trip aside.) That’s still 297 (or however you want to divvy up the households) Nielsen ratings the NFL and CBS aren’t going to get because these people are at my house, where the two are only getting a Nielsen rating of one. (And this is one they’re not even getting, because to have your home counted in the Nielsens, you have to sign your life away to get a little Big Brother Nielsen box.)
I’m not sure why the NFL chose this year to flex its muscle as it did against Fall Creek Baptist Church. I’m sure the NFL has been aware of churches and other non-profit institutions holding Parties Which Shall Not Be Named™ in the past. The American Professional Football National Championship™ has been around for too long, and Super Bowl™ Sunday (is that a trademarked phrase, too, NFL?) has become so ingrained in the American consciousness that I would be quite surprised if no one in the NFL hierarchy was aware of this practice. Again, they just look like royal jerks this go-around.
I, for one, had an enjoyable Super Bowl™ viewing this evening, even if we were limited to 55 inches when we could have gone to 72 or more. It was fun seeing and hearing the reactions of the teenagers, and watching my little phisch tear around the Dungeon while hocked up on watered-down–intentionally so–orange soda and cookies. I didn’t have to endure an obnoxious and overly lavish half-time show featuring a has-been artist. I got to hang out and joke around with Brent, and to a lesser degree, Nathan and Steve. I ate way too much pizza and way too many cookies.
I got to see Tony Dungy get the Super Bowl shot he deserved, and he led his team to victory. I’m happy that Peyton Manning will not become the next Dan Marino. I was glad former LSU Tiger Joseph Addai had a solid game, even if the rookie didn’t score a touchdown. No matter who’s playing, I’m looking forward to the Party Which Shall Not Be Named™ next year.
Raise your hand if you’ve ever seen an entire church moving down the road. Put your hands down; I don’t mean the whole congregation cruising caravan-style. I’m talking about the entire church building.
Well, thanks to the technological miracles of time-lapse photography and YouTube, now you can say you have:
A wave of the phin to Dethroner, and I have to agree with Joel that the video’s soundtrack totally makes it.
Kudos to the gang at Feedburner for the gratuitous usage of Star Wars references in their Hackathon post. My favorite:
Traveling through stats ain’t like dusting crops, boy! Without precise calculations we could fly right through an aggregator or bounce too close to a subscriber and that’d end your trip real quick, wouldn’t it?